Friday night was the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Gallery reading, at which Allen Ginsberg first read his poem ‘Howl‘. The poem was scandalous for its day in several ways, not least of which was its overt homosexuality. LitQuake had an anniversary reading with all sorts of famous San Franciscans, but I couldn’t afford a ticket, so I wandered down to the site of the old Six Gallery and read aloud to passersby. On the one hand, though I had sent out some notifications, no one joined me — just me and ghosts reading to nervous Moloch on his evening stroll. On the other hand, I got drunk off burgundy from an open container on a public walkway while shouting ‘ultimate cunt’, and ‘cock and endless balls’, and did not get arrested, so I figure I broke even.

But I’m not even broke — I’m up to my eyeballs with student loans and pre-employment debts. But I’m burned out on working. I worked seventy-hour weeks for an organisation I despised for a year immediately after college. Since then, stomach won’t let me keep down a job. Big Brothers Big Sisters ruined me for capitalism.

Now, I work three hours five mornings a week, cooking breakfast, cleaning house, and sometimes helping bathe and dress an older man who’s experienced two strokes. This is the perfect situation for me: I’m off work by noon, I still own most of my time, I’m not doing anything I find ethically repulsive, and I’m working face-to-face with another human being.

This is good, and this is the life I choose, but there are costs — $600 a month keeps me housed and well-fed, and keeps the creditors off my back, but I can no longer afford books or chocolate. (However, I do now have time to read at the library and to bake 17¢ loaves of bread.) So, Saturday, after work, when I found $25 on the sidewalk, I was thrilled. That was the first volume of The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams! Or The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth! Or all of Whitman, plus a few Snyder and Di Prima chapbooks! Or Return to Nisa and A Coney Island of the Mind! And that was just new… What could I get used?

So, I hoofed it out of Polk Gulch across the Tenderloin and down the hill into Chinatown on my way to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. Ferlinghetti, if you’re unfamiliar, is a pretty famous poet and sometime novelist of the late San Francisco Renaissance. He’s probably as well known for having published ‘Howl’ (and for the obscenity suit that ensued) as for his own work. Ferlinghetti was San Francisco’s first Poet Laureate, and his bookstore has been a significant local institution for over fifty years.

In Chinatown, I had to wait for a dragon to pass.

Out of Chinatown, onto the precipice of North Beach, and finally to City Lights. City Lights, being what it is, has a poetry room with a Beat wall. I have a lot of American poetic reading to catch up on, so I spent a good time perusing books I ultimately wouldn’t buy. While I was flipping through a complete collection of Walt Whitman’s works, a gaggle of college students stomped into the room, led by a charming twink who promptly disrobed and started hollering the lines of ‘Howl’ before giggles and a video camera. I have a feeling Ginsberg would have approved of the presentation, but the reading was obnoxious and flashy, rather than angry and pained… I had — heh-hehm — heard better. So I got up to go, sliding Whitman back onto the shelf.

In the process, however, I jostled the next book over, and a Zip-Loc bag containing a sizeable chunk of marijuana rolled out from behind. I didn’t realise until I was on my way out that the jostled book was probably Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I did, however, notice a photograph on the wall on my way down: Neal Cassady, shaving in Allen Ginsberg’s San Francisco apartment, 1965. Taped to the mirror is a sketch that says: ‘Clothed or NUDE: we are NOT OBSCENE’. Appropriate.

It was Fleet Week, so on the walk home I was buzzed by the Blue Angels as I passed Donald Duck seamen (’those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love…’ said Ginsberg) gawking at menus in Chinatown dim sum shops. I stopped, once again, for a parade, as Friday was Double Ten Day (十十!), and watched a Chinese-American Boy Scout marching band play KC and Jojo’s ‘All My Life’.

I never spent the twenty-five, and set them aside instead for a trip to Angel Island.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 11 October 2005 at 14:42 and is filed under Miscellanea, San Francisco Streets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.